July 19, 2017

The interview of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) by a New York Time report sucked the energy out of any other news today, perhaps for good reason because of the outrageous–and false–statements he made:

If he had known that current AG Jeff Sessions would have accused himself from the Russia investigation, he would not have appointment Sessions for his position. [Is the U.S. now on resignation watch for Sessions?]

The investigation in Russia’s involvement in the United States—including DDT’s campaign—suffers from conflicts of interest because the lead investigator, Robert Mueller, interviewed for FBI director. DDT claims for have far more conflicts of interest about Mueller that he will reveal “at some point.”

Mueller would cross a “red line” if he looks into DDT’s family finances.

Rod Rosenstein was wrong for appointing Mueller as special prosecutor because he’s only a “deputy,” and DDT was irritated after he learned that Rosenstein was from Baltimore. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any.”

He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”

Former FBI director James Comey lied in his Senate Intelligence Committee testimony—according to DDT. Also Comey told DDT about the salacious allegations against him to gain leverage with DDT.

Senate Democrats need to be careful about voting to confirm Christopher Wray, a lawyer with a past in supporting money laundering and torture, for the FBI director. Wray gave all the right answers in his confirmation hearings, but so did others such as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who reversed their opinions the instant that they were confirmed. During his interview with the NYT, DDT delivered revisionist history about the FBI when he stated that the director reported “out of courtesy” to the Department of Justice during Richard Nixon’s presidential term. DDT said that “the FBI person really reports directly to the President of the United States.” The FBI website states:

“Within the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI is responsible to the attorney general, and it reports its findings to U.S. Attorneys across the country. The FBI’s intelligence activities are overseen by the Director of National Intelligence.”

The president can fire the FBI director, as DDT proved a few months ago, but he can’t tell him what to do. DDT followed his falsehood with the statement, “I think we’re going to have a great new FBI director.” That discussion was interrupted by the appearance of DDT’s daughter, Ivanka, and his granddaughter, Arabella, but the allusion was obvious.

The interview also delved into DDT’s lengthy discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a G20 Summit dinner almost two weeks ago but was just revealed yesterday. That talk had only three people in attendance—DDT, Putin, and Putin’s translator. DDT had no translator, and no one from the United States was a witness. In the interview, DDT described the hour-long conversation as about 15 minutes in length and concentrating on “pleasantries.” He mentioned that it was about adoption, originally given as the focus of a meeting of eight people, including DDT’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and son Donald Jr., a year ago. Jr. later said the meeting was really about Russia offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Putin also banned adoptions of Russian children in 2012 because the U.S. sanctioned Russians about human rights abuses.

DDT gave Putin a gift today when he ended the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad. President Obama started the program in 2013 to put pressure on Assad, so DDT accomplished two goals today—pleasing Putin and wiping out another program from the last administration. Putin and DDT had agreed to back the ceasefire in southwest Syria, but the plan did not require the elimination of the training program. Russia has been firing on the CIA-backed rebels fighting against ISIS, and a U.S. official said, “Putin won in Syria.” Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said the DDT’s actions “are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable…. We are really cutting them off at the neck.” The U.S. may no longer be able to stop other countries such as Turkey and Middle East allies from providing anti-Assad rebels and other more radical groups with sophisticated weapons. Officials have seen the program as a bargaining chip for Russian concessions about Syria’s future.

“The dinner discussion caught the attention of other leaders around the table, some of whom later remarked privately on the odd spectacle of an American president seeming to single out the Russian leader for special attention at a summit meeting that included some of the United States’ staunchest, oldest allies.”

No one has any notes from the meeting except for Putin, meaning that the U.S. has no record of discussions, disclosures, and promises. In his first meeting with Putin at G20, DD accepted Putin’s denials of Russian interference and claimed that the U.S. were “exaggerating” the affect of Russia on the presidential election.

Russia also gave DDT permission to name Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor and presidential candidate, as ambassador to Russia. His name was tossed out four months ago, but he wasn’t officially nominated until Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met at the State Department with Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon.

Since DDT’s talk with Putin, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is considering the elimination of his cybersecurity office. The U.S. was the first country to have a high-level cyber diplomat role. This week, Tillerson fired Christopher Painter, the person in this job. Doing away with the position would make the U.S. the only major country without a leader whose job is to reduce cyberattacks, abdicating the role to Russia and China.

DDT’s interview was a distraction from the “no confidence” resolution that 25 Democratic representatives filed today. The resolution has no chance of passing in the GOP-dominated chamber, but it publicizes the 88 reasons for declaring DDT unsuitable to hold his current office. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) defined the resolution as “an attempt at political intervention.” He said that the resolution details “misdeeds and actions that give people lack of confidence in him and the direction he is taking our country.” Among them are DDT’s refusal to release his taxes, verbal attacks on women and the press, withdrawal from a vital climate agreement, payments from foreign powers, firing the FBI director during an investigation, and indiscriminate use of Twitter. Cohen said that DDT’s track record reveals “a president that you wouldn’t want your children to look up to.”

“The way he talks about women, the press, the language he uses, the use of Twitter — you don’t want him to be a role model. It’s injurious to our culture, and it’s injurious to … our foreign policy.”

“We have a president who actively undermines the very principles of our government, and a Republican Congress that makes excuses for him as though his behaviour were normal. It is not normal. Trump’s behavior is cruel, unethical and it is driving people’s faith in government to dangerously low levels.”

About DDT’s second, just revealed, meeting with Putin, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) said, “This is not the behavior of the leader of the free world.”

The Democrats also criticized GOP representative for defending DDT’s actions. A bill to appoint an outside prosecutor has only two Republican supporters, Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Justin Amash (R-MI). Capitol Hill Republicans for defending Trump’s actions and his unconventional approach to governing.

In today’s news, a major story was Sen. John McCain’s diagnosis of brain cancer. He is indeed fortunate to have excellent health care provided by the government.

May 1, 2017

Donald Trump Jr. is known for killing large animals in Africa such as elephant, leopard, kudu, civet cat, waterbuck, crocodile, antelope, buffalo, and great warthog. Last weekend he changed his sights to Montana and the fierce prairie dog, a species that supports entire ecosystems. They can’t be used for food, and killing them doesn’t provide wildlife management. Right now is the breeding system when female prairie dogs are most likely to be pregnant or nursing. For fun, Jr. went killing with U.S. House candidate Greg Gianforte, who thinks it’s fun to use high-powered rifles that make the animals explode with “body parts severed and sent flying.” That’s what the son of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) did on Saturday, the same day that 200,000 marched in Washington, D.C. for the People’s Climate March.

The People’s Climate March was the second of three massive marches in the nation in just nine days, following the March for Science on April 22, Earth Day. The city was hot—91 degrees that tied the record high for April 29 in 1974—but people joined the 300 other marches in the United States and around the world. Here are photos of signs from WaPo. The size eclipsed the crowds from the March for Science, one week earlier. Paul Getsos, the national coordinator for the People’s Climate March, said:

“It’s not just an enviro event. We have 43 labor union buses, we have indigenous [groups], we’ve been organizing communities of color, we have a big faith and youth contingent. … we are part of a larger resistance.”

A visual time-lapse of the march in Washington is available here along with more signs.

Science supporters are always important, but this year more than any other time in the modern era they are vitally needed. The Republican president, 142 representatives, and 38 senators who reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity causes climate change have received a total of $82,882,725 in donations from coal, oil and gas industries. Only seven states have no climate deniers in their delegations, and I’m proud that Oregon is one of those seven. The other six are five New England states and Delaware.

The Environmental Protection Agency celebrated the week after Earth Day “updating” its website with “language to reflect the approach of new leadership.” The Secretary is a permanent climate denier, and DDT thinks that the Chinese perpetrated the science of climate change as a hoax. This ideology will be reflected in the EPA’s “to eliminate confusion by removing outdated language first.”

Adding to climate denial promotion, the New York Times has hired a known climate denier, Bret Stephens, to write about the climate. Stephens came from the Rupert Murdoch-owned, climate-denying Wall Street Journal where he was deputy editorial page editor. It’s expected that the conservative publication would hire a climate denier, but the NYT has long been considered so progressive than my Republican friend wouldn’t read it.

James Bennet, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, justified the action by saying that there are “millions of people who agree with him.” He added, “There’s more than one kind of denial,” indicating that he might agree with more than one kind of truth. Millions of people, many of them DDT-supporters, deny climate change, but far more believe that climate change exists and it’s caused by humans. Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say they are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, up from 55 percent at this time last year and the highest reading since 2008. In addition, 68 percent of people think that there is climate change and that it’s caused by humans.

Pro-Israel war hawk Stephens once wrote a column on “the disease of the Arab mind” and thinks anti-racists are the real racists. He said that people who accept climate change science are motivated in part by the “totalitarian impulse” and they worship “a religion without God.” According to Stephens, “global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time.” In 2015, Stephens described climate change a “mass hysteria phenomenon” for which “much of the science has … been discredited” and that global warming — along with hunger in America, campus rape statistics, and institutionalized racism — are “imaginary enemies.” He dismissed the well-documented “vanishing polar ice” as based on “flimsy studies.” The NYT itself has documented the problem of melting ice at the poles.

Stephens started his first column for NYT by explaining that scientists could be wrong about climate change because the polls projected a win for Hillary Clinton. First, the polls were right on target with their projections, but the Electoral College process put DDT into the presidency. But more important, scientific analysis isn’t the same as taking surveys. Science isn’t about opinions, it’s about evidence.

In an interview with Vox, Stephens explained that he doesn’t worry about climate change because he knows a climate change activist who “just had a baby.” His belief is that “if he thinks in 20 years we’ll be heading toward unsustainable climates and there will be tens of millions of people being displaced, presumably including himself, at the most apocalyptic level, then presumably he wouldn’t be having children.” So there you have it: people who have children know that climate change doesn’t exist.

His column was so bad that reporters and news editors from the NYT have panned it. Andy Revkin, former NYT climate reporter and blogger quoted twice in Stephens’ first column as justification for his ideas, tweeted that the column featured “straw men” and other flaws. Stephens used reports to support his position, but the report was opposite to what Stephens wrote. The rate of warming, cited by Stephens as “modest,” is 50 times greater since 1880 than the rate of cooling in the previous 5,000 years and drastically increases to probability of destructive catastrophes such as Superstorm Sandy.

The degree of global warming in upcoming decades depends on carbon pollution. Taking immediate action to cut these emissions can limit the warming to perhaps four degrees along with the accompanying climate consequences. Stephens, however, discourages people from doing this by cutting off any discussion about future climate crises.

Both the liberal and the conservative sides of media criticize people who slam the NYT for presenting Stephens’ columns as valid for debate. Yet how far are those “free speech” arguers willing to go in supporting the employment of people who present “alternative facts”? Would the NYT give space to columnists who argue that the world is flat? Or that the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School were faked by the government? At one time, the NYT provided credible journalism. Now it seems to just go with the flow—and the flow is sharply downhill. As Matt Gertz wrote about the NYT after DDT’s election, “The paper sold new subscribers on providing vigorous resistance to the ‘alternative facts’ that fueled his rise. Now, it’s publishing them.”

More protesters marched today, May Day. The White House website noted May 1 as “Law Day” and touted the importance of the Constitution and the partnership of law and liberty. It ignored the theme of the American Bar Association for this year’s Law Day, “Transforming American Democracy,” celebrating the 14th Amendment that “advanced the rights” of all people in the United States “through its Citizenship, Due Process and Equal Protection clauses” as well as “extending the reach of the Bill of Rights to the states.” And it ignored other meanings of May 1, for example International Workers Day and the labor protests in the United States that go back to Haymarket Square 131 years ago.

Although the White House website made no mention of any other meaning to May Day, it might take note because of the huge and angry protests in the United States joining those around the world. This year, the focus was a denunciation of DDT’s crackdown on and deportation of undocumented immigrants, many of them working in low-paying, non-unionized jobs—agriculture, fast-food, hospitality, child care, and other services. Others attacked his Muslim and refugee ban. Some protesters didn’t go to work today, and immigration-run convenience stores and other businesses closed in solidarity. A rally in front of Manhattan offices of Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase protested their dealings with private companies that build and/or manage government detention centers.

The term Mayday is also used internationally as a distress signal in voice procedure. Considering DDT’s actions in his first 100 days, people may need the term.

Killings are great for the bottom line of weapons manufacturers, and representatives from major defense contractors made that clear this week at a conference in West Palm Beach. Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner praised the “indirect” benefits from a war in Syria, and part of his speech was widely shared on the Internet. According to Tanner, Middle East strife and conflict in Syria and Turkey will cause “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theater.” Wilson Jones, the president of the defense manufacturer Oshkosh, concurred about increased sales, and Raytheon Chief Executive Tom Kennedy talked about the “significant uptick.” Another speaker at the conference predicted that ISIS’s active armed profile would lead to more marketing opportunities for US defense firms.

Another reason that contractors celebrated was the $607 billion budget from Congress for the Department of Defense. “Our programs are well supported [in the budget]. We think we did fare very well,” Tanner concluded. Very well, indeed, as did stock holders with weapons manufacturers.

U.S. dealers also profit from terrorism by selling weapons to the terrorists. For example, a M29 semi-automatic pistol has been traced to the Florida gun dealer Century Arms. They bought it from Zastava Arms, a Serbian arms manufacturer, that imports heavy weapons to U.S. dealers. Loopholes in U.S. lax gun laws allow gun dealers to import high-powered rifles “stripped of their military features” so that they can be sold as “sporting rifles.” After arriving in the U.S., rifles can be modified back into assault rifles. Having restored the full killing power of the guns, dealers distribute them to civilians.

Century Arms is a primary importer of the WASR-10, a Romanian modified version of the AK-47 bought legally and smuggled into Mexico where drug cartels use them to spread terror and death. The dealer’s history goes back to its implication in the 1980s Iran Contra scandal when they “supplied rockets, grenades and other weapons to Nicaraguan rebels.”

With 31 percent of global arms exports from 2010 to 2014, the United States is number one in exporting hundreds of billions of dollars worth of military weaponry and equipment. At home, gun sales surged after the San Bernardino as NRA followers repeated the myth of a “good guy with a gun.” NRA collects money for each and every gun sold in the United States, and gun sales are breaking records. Gun production has more than doubled since President Obama was first elected as gun manufacturers and dealers kept spreading the falsehood that he would take away the guns.

Sales from just one company, Smith & Wesson, rose 15.2% to $124.9 million in the past three months and were up 32.1 percent since the same time period last year. Net income was $14.2 million, almost three times the $5.2 million that the company made during the same time period last year. The company’s stock climbed 125 percent in the past 12 months despite an ongoing SEC investigation into the company’s alleged corruption practices.

In response to this travesty, the New York Times published its December 5 editorial, “The Gun Epidemic,” on the front page above the fold for the first time since 1920. That editorial denounced the “cowardice and imbecility” of Warren Harding’s nomination. From the NYT editorial:

“It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday.”

“Across recent decades, gun manufacturers, facing a decline in general gun ownership as demographics shifted and sports hunting faded, have cynically created a domestic market for barely altered rifles and pistols developed for the military. These are weapons designed for the rapid spray-shooting of multiple enemy soldiers in wartime, not homeland civilians living in peace.”

The term “military grade” is one that the NRA and gun “enthusiasts” criticize as a meaningless statement about guns meant for warfare. They try to use descriptions of stocks and barrel length to claim ignorance on the part of gun control advocates. Yet the gun industry itself markets these firearms as weapons of war.

“’As Close as You Can Get Without Enlisting,’ reads one tag line under a photo of a poised shooter aiming the civilian version of a military rifle. An ad for a semiautomatic shotgun promises security whether in ‘Iraq, Afghanistan, Your Livingroom.’ An ad for an armor-piercing handgun shows an embattled infantryman above the line: ‘Built For Them … Built For You.’”

People concerned about the lax U.S. gun laws question why civilians need to own guns “designed to pierce concrete bunkers and armored personnel carriers.” The guns flooding the U.S. are most useful for mass shootings. Not since the tobacco industry lied about the lethal effects of its product have corporations sold a product with the complete understanding of how many deaths would result from their product. The only answer to the necessity for “military grade” gun ownership is always “freedom” and “protection from tyranny,” but a more credible response would be the feeling of control over lesser individuals.

Showing the level of maturity in someone who most likely calls himself a “responsible gun owner,” Erick Erickson, conservative talk radio host and editor of RedState.com, shot holes in a copy of the New York Times. He also invited others to post photos of bullet holes in the editorial. Is it possible that he believes he can destroy an idea by shooting the paper that it’s printed on?

Making profits from gun violence has extended into the schools. These items for sale show the gun culture in a country that has almost no gun restrictions:

Bulletproof blankets: The “Bodyguard™ blanket for school shooting is made of materials used by U.S. soldiers in battle.

Bulletproof backpacks: Armored backpacks rose in sales after the massacre at Sandy Hook, and the number of manufactures has expanded since then.

Bulletproof clothing: Parents asked for “ballistic protection” because they are afraid of sending their children to school. The manufacturer is in Colombia but markets for the American market.

School shooting smartphone apps: This “panic button in the hands of every teacher and staff” alerts participating schools within a five-mile radius as well as “all participating law enforcement officers, on and off duty, who are in close proximity.”

Bulletproof baseball caps: Manufactures claim that the impact from a variety of calibers is “twice that of being hit in helmet with a hockey puck.”

School shooting-focused books: Goodreads lists 51 novels about school shootings, and nonfiction books include how-to guides.

For the parents, a bedside gun holster and a bulletproof Bible. (We might ask how safe any of these devices are–especially the “bedside gun holster.”)

No, this isn’t a parody, and no additional guns, including those in schools, won’t help. Only 3 percent of active shooter events were stopped by a civilian with a gun, according to a FBI analysis of these events between 2000 and 2013; unarmed civilians stopped over four times as many, about 13 percent. The higher the household gun ownership, the greater the number of homicides, according to studies. All weapons manufacturers and dealers are creating are more deaths.

May 28, 2014

Jill Abramson is no longer the executive editor of The New York Times. People started out saying that she was fired because she hired a lawyer after she discovered that she received a far lower salary than her predecessor and then moved into the gossip level that she was “difficult.” They didn’t even directly call her the sexist term “bitch.” Now we have that nice Dean Baquet to decide what we get to read in the newspaper that was known in the past as “liberal.”

Last weekend, he buried an important piece by Gretchen Morgenson on types of private equity fee abuses called “The Deal’s Done. But Not the Fees.” Her piece follows the Wall Street Journal expose of new fee abuses, including pay for services that were never rendered.

Investors in these funds, limited partners, have pushed back against the private equity firms, general partners. The fee abuse is important because the general partners are trying to get more rents from limited partners than they had agreed to pay—a form of Elizabeth Warren’s “tricks and traps.”

Morgenson wrote:

“In some instances, investors’ pockets are being picked,” Andrew J. Bowden, director of the S.E.C.’s office of compliance inspections and examinations, said in a recent interview. “These investors may be sophisticated and they may be capable of protecting themselves, but much of what we’re uncovering is undetectable by even the most sophisticated investor.”

Bowden suggests that the SEC is seeing cases of embezzlement. The public doesn’t realize that private equity general partners collect not only 20 percent of investment profit but also far more fees such as those for transactions and monitoring. To find out more about this, check out Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt’s Private Equity at Work. In this, they write:

“The conventional understanding is that general partners have earned about two-thirds of their compensation from carried interest [the upside fees] and one-third from fixed components such as fees. At some point that relationship changed. One econometric study of 144 buyout funds from 1993 to 2006 found that almost two-thirds of the revenues of PE firms came from fixed components, but this study did not show how or when the proportion of fixed-to-carry changed over this time period.” (p. 254)

Another fee has come from the private equity firms’ hiring senior advisors for acquired companies and then partially collecting the salaries from limited partners. Private equity firms now make more money because they declare the hired executors as unaffiliated contractors. In that way, they don’t have to reimburse limited partners at all, requiring them to pay substantial costs.

Even worse may be the fees charged for services never performed. After Biomet was sold for $13.4 billion, the private equity firms collected not only its 20-percent share but also another $30 million in “monitoring fees” through 2017 although the deal closes in 2015.

We’ll see if Baquet continues to shelter uncomfortable news.

Statistics about women in journalism show that 52 percent of the people in the United States are poorly represented:

Every single editor of The New Republic has been male.

Almost every single newspaper chain is headed by a man, except Gannett.

A recent New Yorker issue was entirely authored by men.

Out of 814 Pulitzer winners, only 113 were female although they were more likely to have graduate degrees and work at a top newspaper.

Men had almost twice as many bylines at women at the nation’s 10 most widely circulated newspapers; the NYT had the biggest gap with 69 percent of bylines going to men.

Women are more likely to cover health and lifestyle and less likely to cover crime, justice, and world politics.

Male opinion-page writers outnumber female writers four to one at three major papers, including the NYT, and four newspaper syndicates.

Not one woman has hosted a late night show.

Few women have programmer-journalist roles, even on liberal projects, and fail to get media notice.

Women have much greater difficulty in getting venture capital for their projects; only 2 percent goes to women.

Digital-first newsrooms are now hiring more programmers and techies who are mostly male. Women have only 27 percent of computer science jobs, and that number isn’t growing.

When Abramson was at the NYT, Slate’s Amanda Hess noted that the newspaper published stories about virtual sexual harassment of female gamers and female homeless children, disrupting what she called “the paper’s masculine approach to news coverage.”

But maybe Abramson was just “difficult.” With Baquet, we may be looking ahead to a kinder, gentler style of news reporting from The New York Times.

Baquet has a history of cooperating with the government, for example when he agreed not to publish the location of a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia in February 2013. The location was eventually revealed but buried within a story. In contrast, The Washington Post printed the location in a story’s headline.

Explaining why he didn’t follow up on a September 2013 Guardian story showing how NSA data on U.S. citizens is shared with Israeli intelligence, Baquet said, “I didn’t think it was a significant or surprising story.” He further justified ignoring it. “I think the more energy we put into chasing the small ones, the less time we have to break our own. Not to mention cover the turmoil in Syria.”

Baquet defended the newspaper’s “low-key approach” to marking the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War by saying, “The war itself has been dissected to a tremendous degree. You have to have something new or fresh to say.” Maybe the legacy of torture and cancer in Iraq after the war? Or the false pretences for the war with no one held accountable? The NYT’s promotion of the manufactured case for the unpremeditated attack on a foreign country? An examination of whether the newspaper might do it was also possible?

Last summer, the NYT also beat the drums for a war in Syria. When asked about the possibility of repeating the newspaper’s mistakes in calling on war, Baquet said, “I’ve never said, ‘Let’s remember what happened with Iraq.’ I don’t think it’s necessary. I haven’t had to instruct the staff to ask hard questions. They are doing that…. The press’s coverage of Iraq always lurks in the background. But it was a long, long time ago.”

At the time he said that, U.S. troops had been officially withdrawn only two years earlier. Veterans don’t see it as “a long, long time ago.” Thanks to the United States, Iraqis are under a brutal regime led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Baquet also supported the Pentagon’s unproved claim that one in seven freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay engaged in militant activity after leaving prison. His refused to use Chelsea Manning’s new name after she announced her transition to being a woman demonstrates a transphobic approach to news.

As a Los Angeles Times editor, Baquet agreed with the government to not publish a story on AT&T’s role in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program as shown by documents available from whistleblower Mark Klein. Again, Baquet claimed that there was no government pressure and thought that they didn’t have a story. Klein went to the NYT with his documents.

At a conference this year, Abramson said, “The responsibility that a news organization has to a source is to really live up to the word that is given by one of our journalists to a source.” She asserted that the public had a right to know the dimensions and scope of all “eavesdropping programs” being used for surveillance as part of the “war on terror.”